Making movies and TV shows set in the future can be dangerous, because while they sometimes turn out accurate, they always run the risk of getting things incredibly wrong and looking embarrassing later when the future they predict doesn’t come to pass.
In fact, this happens more often than not. The history of sci-fi is littered with examples of movies, TV shows, and books that got things completely wrong. That doesn’t mean these movies are bad; it’s just a warning not to put too much stock in what they have to say.
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
The future is all about fax machine
Let’s start with a fun one. In Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) goes to the far future year of 2015 where he tools around on a hoverboard, wears self-lacing shoes, and rides around in a flying car. Also, in this future, fax machine technology has advanced to the point where faxes can be sent almost instantaneously. The technology is so ubiquitous that mailboxes are outfitted with fax machines so you can pick up your communications the moment you arrive home.
Email was already in use in 1989, although it would be several years before it was widespread. Still, it’s funny that Back to the Future II figured that by 2015 we would all be using super-fast fax machines instead. Text messages are not contemplated.
But while that prediction didn’t come to pass, the dream of a flying car has never died. From The Jetsons to Blade Runner to The Fifth Element, this is clearly something humanity yearns for. There are companies working on flying cars, but the design is difficult, the safety concerns are numerous, and the vehicles themselves are significantly harder to operate than normal cars. This may be an example of scientists trying to reverse engineer the dreams of sci-fi futurists no matter how impractical they are.
The Cubs did end up winning the World Series, though. Back to the Future Part II got that part right.
Release Date
November 22, 1989
Runtime
108 minutes
Director
Robert Zemeckis
Christopher Lloyd
Marty McFly / Marty McFly Junior / Marlene McFly
Michael J. Fox
Doctor Emmett Brown
Thomas F. Wilson
Biff Tannen / Griff
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)
Who needs Jurassic Park when the planet Venus is right there?
It’s easy to make fun of campy movies from the 1960s for getting the future wrong, but Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet deserves special mention. In this movie, not only do our astronauts make it to Venus, but they find dinosaurs living there. The best safari in the solar system is just 150 million miles away.
Slightly more plausible is Voyage’s contention that by the year 2020 humanity would have colonized the Moon. This is another recurring theme in science fiction; movies like Star Trek: First Contact, Starship Troopers and more envision a future where we’re living on the lunar surface. Even For All Mankind, the best sci-fi show no one is watching, lays out a version of history where we had a small colony on the Moon in the 1970s.
In our reality, NASA actually drew up a plan for a colony on the Moon where 10 people could live. That was in 2016, and they predicted that it could be done by 2022. Obviously it didn’t happen. While we may have the technology to do something on the Moon, the enormous cost makes it unrealistic, something sci-fi authors don’t have to contend with.
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The Running Man (1987 and 2025)
Furturists are convinced that sports will turn deadly on purpose
Another theme running through a lot of science fiction stories is that sports, television, and murder will eventually collide, and we’ll all be watching people kill each other for entertainment.
In The Running Man, our main character participates in a deadly game show in hopes of winning a huge cash prize, despite knowing he probably won’t live through it. In Rollerball, people are entertained by the titular sport, where players routinely die in brutal ways. Pretty much the same is true of Motorball from Alita: Battle Angel. In The Hunger Games, the tyrannical government of Panem pits citizens against each other in death matches that captivate the masses.
This idea recurs so often in science fiction that you’d figure it’s right around the corner…but so far it has yet to materialize. But if sports ever do become a deadly snuff film, we’ll be ready.
Release Date
November 11, 2025
Runtime
133 minutes
Director
Edgar Wright
Colman Domingo
Bobby Thompson
The Terminator (1984)
AI is here and it’s dumber than we thought
There is no shortage of movies that predict that artificial intelligence will eventually become so smart and powerful that it will try to eradicate human beings. In The Terminator movies, Skynet goes late in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and from there it’s not long until robot armies are wiping us out. In The Matrix universe, robots fight and enslave humans before using them as batteries. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, an AI system is trying to kill human astronauts by the turn of the century.
Generative AI has exploded in our world, and it’s definitely changing the way a lot of people interface with technology. But we also get reports of AI making up fake legal cases when lawyers try to use it their work, people becoming so attached to chatbots that they become disassociated with reality, and an overwhelming majority of CEOs admitting that, despite a lot of hype, AI hasn’t changed their workflows much.
AI technology is still developing fast, so there’s no telling where it could be in a few years, but here at the outset, the concerns sci-fi writers had about robots rising up seem vastly overblown.
Release Date
October 26, 1984
Runtime
108 minutes
Director
James Cameron
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Terminator
Linda Hamilton
Sarah Connor
Demolition Man (1993)
Crime-free and feeling fine
This one is less a trend and more just an opportunity to poke fun at Demolition Man, a delightful slice of 1990s cheese about a cop and a criminal (Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes) who are cryogenically frozen only to be woken up in 2032, when crime has been eliminated through a combination of social engineering, mental conditioning, and the removal of all risk factors, resulting in a pacifist, utopian society. The people in this time are completely unprepared for the badass violence Stallone and Snipes are about to release.
2023 is still a few years away, but it’s hard to believe we’ll have cracked world peace by then. It’s true that violent crime in the U.S., for example, is at a lower level than it’s been at more or less any time in history, but worldwide conflicts are heating up, with war raging in many places around the world.
Utopian sci-fi in general seems like a pipe dream right about now, whether it’s Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Lois Lowrey’s The Giver or the shows and movies set within the Star Trek universe, where we’ve at least managed to mostly stop war on Earth. We’ve got a ways to go.
Release Date
October 8, 1993
Runtime
115 minutes
Director
Marco Brambilla
Sylvester Stallone
John Spartan
Wesley Snipes
Simon Phoenix
Sandra Bullock
Lt. Lenina Huxley
Nigel Hawthorne
Dr. Raymond Cocteau
Soylent Green (1973)
Overpopulation was overblown
Soylent Green is set in the year 2022, when resources are stretched so thin across a booming population that we need to mix people into our food. This idea was born of a fear of world overpopulation that was rampant in the 1960s and ’70s. You can see it in other movies of the time, like Logan’s Run (1976), or much later in movies like Elysium (2013).
But that fear pretty much abated in the years since Soylent Green, as humanity found that it was capable of producing enough food to feed a growing population. Since then, the fear has gone the other way, with a lot of chatter these days about drop-offs in fertility. Soylent Green is a good example of how even though sci-fi often looks to the future, it’s usually about the present.
Release Date
May 9, 1973
Runtime
97 Minutes
Director
Richard Fleischer
Writers
Stanley R. Greenberg, Harry Harrison
Charlton Heston
Detective Thorn
Edward G. Robinson
Sol Roth
Chuck Connors
Tab Fielding
The fun of being wrong
I’ll reiterate that just because some of these movies predicted the future incorrectly doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth watching. Sci-fi writers want to explore what could be possible. They’re not going to get everything right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t entertain us along the way.
But if you’re interested in a sci-fi story that gets it right, they exist, like the underrated TV show Continuum.
